


Heroes.

by quigonejinn



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-09
Updated: 2012-04-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:46:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Howard, alcohol, a dead-end town.  <i>Some years later, you find yourself touring a Rust Belt town.</i>  Disturbing content warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heroes.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to [DW ](http://quigonejinn.dreamwidth.org/149276.html#cutid1) on 4/19/2009. 
> 
> Seriously, creepy bad touch lies ahead.

This story is better told in summary: you are born. You go to school. You go to war, not so much for your country, but to seize, with both hands, an opportunity that comes maybe once in the lifetime of a once-in-a-century genius. For a number of years thereafter, the current of history and work bear you along until, one day, some years later, you find yourself touring a Rust Belt town. It is almost like waking from a dream: the town three hundred miles from nowhere. You fly to the nearest regional airport, then take a helicopter. The population is a third of what it was thirty years ago, but the mayor and governor, who are both there, assure you that if jobs come, the workforce will be there. 

Around the town are soybean fields. They crowd close to what was once the main drag of the town; individual farmers left the area, and you're pretty sure that Stark Industries supplies pharmaceuticals and enhanced crop seed to the. Interrupting the conversation that Obadiah and the governor are having about possible tax incentives, you put down the tumbler with Scotch and chipped ice into a leather cup holder, and you reach forward and tap your knuckle on the partition. 

"Stop the car," you tell the driver. 

He does. You open the door and walk up, through the hot, close Indiana summer, to the sidewalk in front of the the boarded up cinema. It's pristine. The posters from May 9, 1963 are still in the windows. 

"Mind if I look around?" 

Your company is thinking of building tactical satellites there. The governor looks at the mayor, and the mayor shrugs. You ask the driver for the crowbar out of the spare tire kit, and you pry off the boards on the door, and you go inside to look for parts to -- it isn't easy finding parts to keep your old-fashioned newsreel projector in shape these days, and eventually, the mayor and the governor and his bodyguard and even Obadiah come in to climb around the inside structure with you. The roof is mostly intact, so the seats are pristine. 

Somebody tells the driver to bring the Scotch and a bucket of ice. You tell stories about working on the Manhattan Project because you're still not authorized to talk about the other project you worked on, the one where the test subject was four months and six days older than you and was the real reason Oppenheimer called you the Nazi-killer because the bomb ended up killing Japs. There are stories. There is drinking. Everybody has a good time, drinking and talking, until you fall off the beam where the bunch of you are sitting. 

You break your arm. 

You have a vague memory of drinking some more anyways, of being flown by helicopter to a hospital. You take painkillers, and after the plane lands back in New York, you and Obadiah go and have a little more fun -- you meet up with some ladies, and you wake up in the family hotel suite on the other side of dawn. Your head aches, but someone has a head on your knee. Obadiah's blazer is over the two of you. 

The mouth is damp, and the hair is dark, and the lips are willing, and -- 

...

Your son is thirteen years old when he goes to college outside of Boston. Trains run between Boston and other cities; trains take students home after the end of classes. Tony ditched the family chauffeur, who waited outside his dorm with one of the Rolls, and took commuter trains south. 

It costs money to take a taxi out to Long Island, but they knew him at the St. Regis. 

Having inherited both his mother's taste for alcohol and your taste for getting blind drunk, he remembers nothing about it, and years later, Tony will get on a podium and make a speech talking about watching newsreels and learning what it means to be an American on the knee of his father. You are dead then, but Obadiah Stane is there to smile, quite broadly. He raises a glass of Scotch in memory.

**Author's Note:**

> montana_crows _asked_ for Howard/Tony. It's not my fault.


End file.
